What changes when the shopper is software?
Everything a store does to persuade humans stops working. Agents do not respond to design, advertising, or brand feeling; they query product feeds and price endpoints, weigh attributes such as price, availability, delivery window, and return policy, and buy wherever the stated parameters win. The funnel compresses into one delegated request: search, comparison, and checkout collapse together. If your catalog and policies are not machine readable, agents cannot consider you at all.
What should a business actually do about it?
Publish structured product data through clean interfaces, state return and delivery policies unambiguously, and keep inventory and pricing accurate in real time; an agent that finds stale data buys elsewhere next time. Internally, buying through agents needs scoped payment methods, spending thresholds, and human approval above set values, especially in procurement. Watch the risks: a manipulated product listing can steer an agent through prompt injection, and permissions tend to expand quietly until someone audits them. Underneath sits familiar machinery, an AI agent reading systems through structured interfaces much like MCP and executing purchases via tool calling, so preparation means exposing what you already sell in a form software can read and trust.